


a girl wants nothing

by gul



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, First Time, arya is a conflicted young lady, perhaps unconventional assassin training
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-11-28
Packaged: 2018-07-19 10:27:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7357573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gul/pseuds/gul
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arya Stark is driven by wants. A girl cannot be.</p><p>Chapter 3 up--a man must make a choice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This features an older Arya who has been training at the House for some years.

It was very dark and very late, and in the House of Black and White Arya Stark played a game of shadows with herself—one she knew she could win, to take the sting from the day’s defeat.

It was very late but but the candles in the corridor burned and guttered in their scooped arched stone alcoves. Sometimes it was her job to light them. Tonight she water-danced, slipping in between the shadows as they flickered like a little black minnow. Darting as close as she dared to the light pooling in rough dark stone, treating any touch of light on her skin as fire itself, practicing lunges with her dagger.

Arya conjured figures in the darkness ahead to kill. She gave them faces. They gave her purpose.

If the light touched her, she lost.

The game took her mind off the day. Off her pretty faceless sister—and her pretty sister across the sea, whom she had managed not to remember for some time until now. It took her mind off all the doors that were closed to her now and those that always would be—and off the pressing blackness that seemed to grow heavier in her heart each day.

Earlier, she and another Faceless acolyte (a young woman like herself) had been assigned the same man. A pale ugly merchant, putting ashore in Braavos for some days with a wife at home who had bought his gift with her prayers and a few priceless tomes.

Arya had shadowed him in a series of three guises she took no small amount of pride in. She saw no trace of her competitor, a voluptuous redhead with a languor to her stride that she could never shake no matter the disguise and by which the dark-haired girl could always spot her.

She finally found him finally in a pleasure-house. The place stank of sweat and sex and the rank floral essences used to mask it all, along with the undercurrent tang of wine. She had gotten so close to slipping poison into his drink—only to see her there, in his lap, laughing and caressing and kissing. Arya had sneered before she caught herself. He was under her Faceless sister’s spell. It was no trick at all for the other girl to have him suck poison off her fingers, one by one, and to thank her for it.

 _Unfair_ , Arya thought hotly of her sister—her faceless sister, she clarified to herself. Although she knew it was not unfair; she had just been the slower one, having hidden.

She had walked home—to the House, at least—after the man had passed out for the last time.

The warm night sky in Braavos always had a dark weight to it that she could not remember from clear cold Winterfell, with its scattered stars in a black sky like shattered sea ice. The sky in Braavos had felt oppressive this night as she walked home from her defeat. In Winterfell the sky felt infinite; here the sky could feel as if it were closing in. As if she were soon reaching some kind of end; as if something were waiting for her that she could not defeat.

She remembered less and less of Winterfell.

Even indoors, Arya could not concentrate. She could not sleep. She kept thinking of her sister—the one she missed, the one she could never seem to stop missing no matter how she had disliked her. After most of the others had retired, she found her favourite hallway and practiced. The only sound was her breath, and the occasional sputter of flame, as she cut her way down the well-worn path.

Sometimes, though, even the familiar dark was not enough; her eyesight blurred with heat and wet and she did not see the very real figure in front of her until she was almost upon him.

By reflex, she pulled herself to the far wall with dagger drawn. The lip of the alcove dug into the small of her back; the flame was hot on her skin.

The figure was a man. He wore dark clothing and the face of her friend who had called himself Jaqen H’ghar, with wide heavy-lidded eyes, slightly bent nose, full lower lip, red and white hair. A handsome face, she had decided some time ago with a start.

The Faceless men traded faces often, but after an amount of time Arya could tell the brothers and sisters apart no matter whose face they wore. Upon quick observation, she realised that this man was who she thought of as _her Jaqen_.

( _Her Jaqen_ , although a girl has no possessions and a man has no name.)

(She knew this was not his name. She knew this was almost certainly not his true face. Even his Lorathi speech patterns were an affectation, tied only to this face. Jaqen H’ghar was dead. And yet.)

Her Jaqen was distinctly expressive when he was relaxed. His eyes never betrayed him but at his mouth amusement and irritation and, often lately, regret seemed to linger. This is what gave him away now. His lips were twisted slightly, although whether out of annoyance or affection she could not tell (she could never tell).

"A girl should be in bed; she has duties tomorrow," Jaqen said, walking into the light, standing in front of her. Her small body blocked some of the light and so half of him was still in dancing shadow.

"A girl cannot sleep," she said, folding her arms. "She is reviewing her mistakes today."

"Yes? Not stabbing into the dark with no thought as to the safety of those in it?"

"Maybe not to those _hiding_ in it, no," she snorted. "Anybody here should be able to figure out how not to get stabbed. That seems like a bare minimum to expect."

His lips quirked. "Just so."

His closeness in the pool of flickering half-light and the strength of his gaze made the short moment of silence interminable.

“Or not mistakes, I suppose,” she hastened to add, looking away. "I did pretty well. She just used a quicker strategy.”

“A more advanced strategy, perhaps.”

Arya cast him a black look at the hint of amusement in his voice, and scoffed. “What, simpering and giggling and kisses, all to get some man’s favour like you can’t do anything yourself? How is that advanced?”

The girl had at least the presence of mind to realise her pain did not only stem from her failures today. And she knew it was unworthy of her; but for a girl who wanted to be the best at everything, it needled her that others had traits and abilities she did not understand and had no propensity for. That sometimes everyone else seemed to belong to a different world than she did.

She missed her sister, she realised. Arya Stark’s sister.

She knew Sansa had not had an easy time of it ever since they left Winterfell. If Arya had been there now, she could have helped her. And Sansa could have helped Arya in turn. They could have trusted each other; saved each other.

These wounds only hurt if she acknowledged them, of course.

“Stupid girls do it all the time,” she spat.

The man raised his eyebrow. "And do not think these ladies do not train themselves just as long and as cruelly and get just as hurt, in their own way, as a girl does with her swords and sticks. A girl is foolish if she neglects these more subtle things."

"Subtle!"

His lip curled, just a little, just briefly. "A man thinks that if she cannot see the value in the skills of persuasion and seduction—" at the soft dark way he spoke, she suppressed a shiver and wondered at herself—"then perhaps she cannot wield a dagger or poisons with any efficacy."

Arya grimaced and slipped her dagger back in the pocket of her dress. Didn’t he know she was nothing like those other girls, nothing like her pretty sister who knew how to charm, for whom men tripped over themselves to please.

She had no talent to charm or attract or please. Those she loved always left her. He perhaps did not know of her own quiet heart’s lament she tried to drown out with her prayer—Jon, Robb, her father, her mother, Gendry, even the bloody Hound. She was a dark harsh thing, who wanted no more than to be a blade in the dark with no name and no one to miss; nothing and no one lacking.

Dark and harsh and wanting, and unable to let well enough alone.

“It’s just a skill, then?”

“Like any other.”

“Bet it helps if you’re all soft and _sweet_.”

He smiled softly. “Sometimes, sweet girl. Some want their partners not so sweet.”

She bit her lip, sneered. _Sweet girl_. “What do you want?”

“A man wants nothing.”

“Right. Teach me then,” she said, and tilted her chin up so he might miss the fear she felt.

Jaqen narrowed his eyes. “Teach a girl what?”

“Teach me how to do what my Faceless sister did. Teach me how to persuade. What a body can do other than hurt.”

Jaqen said nothing, but looked her up and down slowly. He had never so much glanced at her body except to check her form and stance, and Arya steeled herself; she felt utterly exposed.

She stood straighter, out of defiance. She had stopped growing some months ago, and filled out to an annoying extent. Jaqen did not loom over her as he had used to, but still she tensed. His cool eyes felt hot on her body like flame.

“It’s just a strategy, right?” she challenged, echoing his words. “Just a transaction.”

Jaqen reached out to stroke her cheek, slowly, and she closed her eyes as he touched her. The last time she had been touched with affection, a part of her remembered, was by the Hound in his clumsy way as he cuffed her or tousled her hair or picked her up onto his horse.

She had not missed it, of course.

“A girl would play with forces she does not understand.”

She snorted. “What, _you_?”

He chuckled softly, looking away briefly into the darkness. “No, precious girl,” he said. “ _You_.”

His rare use of the pronoun unsettled her.

“Besides which,” he shrugged. “A girl is young.”

“Not so young. Older by years than when my sis—…when ladies of Westeros are wed.”

His stare was unforgiving. “Why does a girl want this now?”

She had no answer; only racing thoughts:

Because she is hurtling towards a darkness she cannot understand and is not prepared for. Because sometimes the words she spoke at night and the thought of him were all that held her together—he was all she could hold on to, a friend to a memory to a symbol and now a cipher of a man. That once she lost her family it was him she held high, if she could only get to him, if she could only get close to him she would be powerful and safe, and there were ways to do this but they were shrouded in the same razor-lined dark as her future.

Because she does not know what he is to her, or she is to him, except she cannot lose him too.

“I need to learn,” she said simply, desperately. “I need to know everything.”

He took a deep breath; considered. “If a man is to instruct a girl,” he finally said, “he would have her choose a face for him in the hall she finds pleasing.”

She furrowed her brow. “What’s wrong with your face now?”

Jaqen looked at her as if she were joking. “A girl may find these proceedings unpleasant or distracting if a man keeps a face she knows so well. Perhaps instead she would like to choose a face she finds attractive, to make her experience more comfortable and instructive.”

“I like yours. It makes me comfortable.”

“Why?”

“I know a man wouldn’t hurt a girl.”

“A girl lies.” He reached out to stroke her arm, where bruises bloomed from the last time they had played the lying game.

Arya jerked back. It would not do to have him feel her goosebumps. “Not for your own purposes, anyway. I suppose, I mean, you won’t take advantage of my lack of knowledge.”

He looked at her, unreadable as ever. “And what if a man seeks his own enjoyment?”

She laughed, derisively. “Come now, I’m not an _idiot_ —ahh!”

He was so very fast.

With, it seemed, one fluid movement, the candle in the alcove behind her was snuffed out and he lifted and seated her in the alcove. He parted her legs to stand between them, stroking her thighs above her skirts, leaning into her with hooded lids.

She could barely make out his face in the new pool of dark they swam in; she reached out to push him away but only rested her hands against his chest. He leaned in to her and kissed her neck, lightly at first, the scrape of stubble and the whisper of hair and the soft heat of his lips on her skin sent jolts through her body.

Arya froze. He kissed and nipped slowly up her neck as his caresses on her legs radiated slowly outward. One of his hands pushed back her skirt and traced burning designs on her thigh while the other crept up and past her ribcage to cradle her face as he kissed her mouth—gently at first, catching her lower lip between his, her upper, and she made a small surprised sound and arched against him in spite of herself.

He let her deepen their kiss.

He held her close, taking kiss after demanding kiss, stealing all her breath away and Arya panicked because she wanted nothing then but to pull him closer, be wrapped in his arms and held against him, held by him.

A part of Arya was furious at him for so cavalierly calling her bluff and manipulating her body like this; the rest of her was swept away by his strength and his smell and taste, ginger and clove and honey and him.

She was not sure what she was supposed to do—fight him? Touch him? Her body did not feel her own; Jaqen’s proximity and warmth made her feel so strange, like all her blood was rushing to the surface to reach him. She tentatively pressed herself against him, running her hands up his muscled back.

He broke away to whisper in her ear, low and hoarse. “A man has been wishing for a girl to ask this of him, lovely girl, lovely Arya,” he said, and other endearments— _brave_ , _clever_ , _beautiful_ , _precious_ —that pierced her heart. The growl behind his whisper made her shiver, as his touch ghosted over, under, across her breast, cupping and lightly pinching so she could not focus on any one place on her body, but only withstand the onslaught.

Some strange energy was curling in her body, pooling in her thighs and stomach. Arya knew enough of want and need to know that this is what she is feeling; she is a slave to it, to her own need for oblivion and blood.

The man pulled back to catch her eye. He looked at her now with not affection or disappointment or irritation but with desire, a want that scraped up against the edges of lust. She felt she was falling again, into that darkness she did not understand, although this one seemed sweeter.

She moaned slightly as his hand trailed up her skirt, along her inner thigh, and he smiled.

“A girl is always so eager to pass a man’s tests, to satisfy him. To get what she wants. To prove—”

Arya disliked his implication, and pulled him down by the neck to kiss him. She felt him smiling against her lips before she let him go.

“Is this what she wants?” he asked, beginning to slowly pull at the ties of her blouse, his left hand still under her skirt.

“A girl wants nothing.”

A pinch at her thigh, and she gasped. “Lies.”

“‘Yes,’ she said, hopelessly. ‘That is what I want.’ She did not specify further.

‘A girl is so preoccupied by _her own desires_ ,’ he murmured, disentangling himself from her clothes and resting his hands at her waist, ‘she does not know how to navigate another’s. This a girl must learn.’

‘A girl will learn—ah—‘

As she spoke, he eased her blouse down, exposing her shoulders and the beginning of the small swell of her breasts. He kissed her neck, her collarbone, down further—

“ _Oh_ ,” she whispered, “Jaqen—“

At the sound of what was not his name, the man stopped and stepped back. He pulled her blouse back up and tied it; his face was unreadable but he would not meet her eye. The only sign he had been occupied in anything other than mixing a poison was his breathing, which was still heavier than normal and slightly audible.

Arya bit back an emotion she could not name. “I’m sorry,” she blurted.

He looked up at her, almost startled, and gently placed his hand behind her neck to press her forehead to his. He kept her there for a moment with his eyes closed, inhaling and exhaling slowly.

“You didn’t have to say all those lies,” she said, almost a whisper. The endearments had seemed cruel, even from Jaqen H’ghar of the Faceless Men, even if they were meant for her to learn of their efficacy.

_I don’t want to play this stupid game any more._

He released her, only looking regretful. “Go to your bed now and sleep, Lady Arya Stark,” he said. He brushed back and smoothed his hair, which had fallen out of place. “Sleep now, brave lovely girl.”

He turned to leave.

Arya’s throat seemed tight. “Will I…did I ruin—“

Jaqen stopped. “A man did not lie to his reckless girl.”

_We never stop playing._

(His girl.)

A surge of relief, of hope. Arya gathered herself quickly, smoothing her skirts, grounding herself in the scrape of stone against flesh as she slid down from the alcove.

But he was long gone, a lone black figure disappeared into the darkness that lay both behind her and in front.

A sea of blood, it seemed, where she had come from. Where she was still to go.

She could not decide which was the more terrible.


	2. a girl needs no one

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Arya leaves the House of Black and White. She does not leave with nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: what up hard rating change so be aware. Also, what up not being able to shut up it’s a long one.

 The city and its streets glittered at night. She could hear the black water rushing around the jetties, lapping at the lips of the canals.

 Arya Stark walked back into Braavos from the docks, her last heated exchanges with the last captains she had spoken to crackling in the back of her head.

 No ship out to Westeros till _the next day_ , not for money, not for work, not even for flesh. She bought passage on the one leaving the soonest, and would walk till it left, she decided. Take a last turn around this cursed city.

 Although walking didn’t seem enough, somehow. She wanted to leap about the glittering wet canals all night and skewer any Facelesswho might come after her. She wanted to burn the bright city down, down to the last dripping fishnet, the last iron coin, so she might never be tempted to return.

 A man had said nothing of substance in the end, when she confronted him, No one or Jaqen H’ghar or whatever in the seven hells that stupid fake-Lorathi faceless bastard fancied himself. A man had walked into her blade and smiled his damned half-smile, as the tip of her blade indented his clothes, his flesh.

 One more name for her _other_ list. Her list she didn’t speak aloud, the list of names that her killing list was recited as a swaggering ward against—the names of those who had abandoned her. Those who had cared for her, so she thought—and still chose to fail her.

 (She knew that leaving her behind was not (always) their choice; it mattered little now, alone again, alone now in Braavos.)

 As Arya walked the winding and multilevel streets and wove through the night citizens, she broke her own rules and whispered her other list:

 “Father. Mother. Robb. Gendry. Hound. _”_ And now, spat like an oath, “ _Jaqen_.”

 Her lord father had not been wise enough. Her lady mother had not been patient enough. Robb had not been cautious enough. Gendry had not been brave enough. The Hound—the only one yet to change lists—had not been strong enough. _Jaqen had not been…what_ , she thought. Honest enough? Truthful enough? He had lied to lure her here to the House of Black and White, only to ask her to give up to him all that she was and all that she wanted, lest she be killed.

 He had lied to her when…well, he had lied to her on _that_ night, too. For equally unknown reasons.

 The moonlight fractured through her sudden hot tears and she was blind once more. She hissed curses as she wiped her eyes, earning a baleful look from a stray cat perched on a wet barrel.

 So foolish, to be upset over being betrayed by fucking _Jaqen H’ghar_. Stupid lying fucker with his sly and clever face, when he wore it—and with his low-key demeanor, low dark voice and hidden thoughts. His baffling tendency to express affection through strange gifts: Deaths. Names, others’ and her own reclaimed one. Escapes. Second chances. Blindness.

 A kiss, when asked.

 She looked up, and the moon was only getting brighter as the night grew darker, and more and more stars were appearing between the jagged rooftops.

 At first when she left the House she had worn a stolen face, of another young girl, but had soon abandoned it. She would be Arya Stark when she left, as she had been when she came. And if Jaqen or another Faceless wanted to kill her, she figured, she probably could not stop him with anything as meaningless as a face.

 She stopped. No, she didn’t want to leap about the canals. She didn’t want to burn the city. A girl wants nothing, but Arya Stark is not just a girl, and tonight she wanted, for once, to have answers.

 Night was well underway when she reached the House of Black and White. It shone smooth and pale and implacable under the moonlight like the still and sleepless death masks that filled its great hall. She took a hidden side entrance; she had only used the great doors at the front twice, when she had first come, and last gone.

 The late hour offered her some minimal protection. Those Faceless brothers and sisters who were not on missions kept relatively regular hours in the House, although there were always one or two manning the shrine for those drowning in sorrow after the black night fell. Padding through the dark, Arya neatly avoided anywhere near that shrine as she made her way to Jaqen’s sleeping chamber.

 Unlike the acolytes, who slept in barely-glorified catacombs, those actually of the order had assigned rooms—or, at least, rooms they slept in regularly. This had confused her at first, since the Faceless were meant to keep no possessions and no identity. But, she had realised, it was probably better to not have to negotiate where you slept every single night. These rooms (she had mostly seen them while cleaning) were identical , small and spare, without anything to mark them except the odd weapon or poison work that might lay on the lone wooden desks.

 She only knew Jaqen’s room because he would sometimes invite her to examine some delicate weapon or poison, and would bring her in to examine them while they were in progress. They would stand close as he gently explained whatever subtly horrific thing he was crafting, his blue (or black or green or gold eyes) shining softly, his small smile with a hint of pride as she mastered what he was saying. Sometimes he brushed back his red (or black or blond or brown hair) before he leaned over her to make some modification, sometimes resting a hand on her shoulder as he did so.

 Her rage and sorrow carried her unthinkingly forward like the tide. It was only when she reached his simple wooden door, left ajar, that she stopped and breathed. From her blouse, she grabbed her favourite throwing knife—and slipped into his room.

 Inside was absolute dark. Only a small movement in the bed—and then a candle lit, and Arya blinked.Jaqen H’ghar, wearing the infuriating face she knew, sat upright in his narrow bed, in his pale robe.

 “Close the door,” he ordered.

 Arya flushed, and obeyed. “You _sleep_ with this face?” she spat—quietly—as a greeting.

 “A man did not sleep,” he said. His usual smirk was absent; his face was solemn and drawn. The flickers of the single tall candle made it more difficult than normal to gauge his expression. “A man waited.”

 (That he was using his preferred face meant she had to deal with his tiresome Lorathi speech. And that stupid white streak in his hair, which she had once found intriguing but now only seemed a vain affectation. She often wondered if he didn’t so favour that face—if it _was_ a face he was wearing, and not his own—because it was so strange and handsome.)

 She tilted her chin; her knife was still raised and ready.

 “You knew I would come.”

 “A man hoped.” And then, the small cryptic smile she now hated.

 Arya laughed, coldly. “Just like you _hoped_ I’d kill the Waif when you sent her after me, right?”

 He bowed his head. “A man hoped. It was a test for the both of you. She failed.”

 “And I passed. Even though I didn’t kill Lady Cra—even though I didn’t do a single thing you told me to.”

 Jaqen seemed to consider his words very carefully. He took a deep breath. “A girl was never meant to be no one,” he finally said.

 “In that you didn’t want me to be, or I never had it in me?” She narrowed her eyes, asked what she had recently come to suspect. “Did _someone else_ tell you to find me and bring me here and train me? For what purpose?”

 “This, a man cannot say.”

 “Don’t know, or won’t tell me?” Arya drew back her knife, as though it might actually frighten him. His eyes flicked up to it, and back to hers, and his mouth twitched although whether it was in amusement or disappointment or something else entirely, she couldn’t say.

 “A girl is imprudent,” he said, and there was venom in his voice. “She was allowed to leave after giving up her training, but this was as a rare courtesy. Some brothers and sisters would prefer not to let your desertion stand; would prefer to offer you up to the Many-Faced God. A man has only bought her a little time.”

 “And _why would you do that, Jaqen._ ”

 “Jaqen H’ghar is dead—“

 “ _STOP that_ ,” she seethed. “Stop that, stop all that _shit_.That is _you_ , isn’t it?” she said, as she jabbed towards him with her short sharp knife.“If I peel off your handsome face or whatever face is under it, if I peeled it off and wore it, would I not remember helping a lost and angry little girl named Arya Stark, at Harrenhall? Would I not remember telling her to come and find me? Self-abnegation is one thing, but it is only so possible. I may not be no one but I do know that. The waif’s little vendetta, that was not an act of no one. You, recruiting me, you offering me gifts and helping me escape. That was not the act of no one.”

 Jaqen paused. “Just so,” he said finally.She was pleased to see that he looked almost sullen, as he did the first time she had named him. Another way she could always recognise him—he tended to sulk, when gotten the better of.

 “But don’t worry. I’m not here for long,” she said. “I’ll leave for Westeros as soon as the sun rises and we will never meet again this side of the Stranger. If you will not tell me to whose purpose you invited me here, then tell me—did you help me then to lure me here now? You do not kill every time a life is saved; you do not offer names and lives to angry children, that king’s ransoms would be charged for otherwise.”

 He shifted his legs off the bed, slowly, so as not to startle her. “A man’s saved life is a precious thing. He was repaying a kindness shown.”

 “That’s _horseshit_. What did you want from me? What did you want me to learn—to do, after I had learned it?”

 “A man wants nothing,” he said.

 “Ugh!” she exclaimed. _Fuck the Lorathi; fuck the Faceless men, fuck and fuck in particular Jaqen fucking H’ghar._ “Fine. Then answer this—what _am_ I do you?” she asked, and could not keep the quaver from her voice. “A failed experiment? A successful one? I followed you, Jaqen. I followed you far and away, like you said when you _left_ me. And you lied to me.”

 Something black and lonely was rising in her. She did not know whether it would come out as a sob, or a thrown knife. Or both. “All you ever did was _lie_.”

 “A man does not lie to his lovely girl,” he said, almost purred, and she remembered the last time he said that and shivered. He leaned forward and gripped the side of his bed. “But a man cannot give her all the answers she wants—although if it were his decision, she would have all she ever wanted…even if I would wish to spare you from it.”

 When she studied languages at the House, she had once read that the Lorathi nobility would only shift to first person as a marker of great intimacy, or great insult.

 She dropped her arm, letting her knife fall to grasp it by the handle. “You told me I could offer them all up. All my names I carry. I think you only ever wanted me to offer up myself.”

 Jaqen tilted his head in acknowledgment. “That is all a girl can offer.”

 She gripped her knife tighter. It was only a few steps to the side of the bed.

 He let her come close, holding her gaze, just as he had earlier when he walked into her blade and dared her to kill him. She stood between his legs and pressed the point of knife against the depression in his neck where his collarbones met. She imagined she could feel his pulse through the metal.

 Jaqen tilted back his head, narrowing his eyes to savour the feel of the blade, his vague soft smile daring her to push it in.

 “Tell me why I was brought here,” she said, pushing just enough so that a trickle of red dripped and pooled in the hollow of his throat. She had never seen Jaqen bleed and felt a rush of joy at the sight. “Give me _something_.”

 “A girl has been told,” he said. “A man would give his precious girl all in his power he had to give; but he cannot give her these answers.”

  _Precious_. Her gut clenched. She couldn’t kill him. Even if she was able to, she _couldn’t_. Instead she breathed, deeply, to soothe all the rage in her, that ragged ravenous thing—and then Arya smiled again, showing all her teeth. 

 She let the weapon fall back at her side. “If you do not indeed lie—then give me _you_. Finish your lesson. From the last time you _lied to me_ , told me I was _precious_ to you.” She widened her eyes, playacting innocence. “You would not send me off with an incomplete education?”

 Jaqen’s eyes flared. He turned away from her; otherwise he kept still, and did not speak for some time.

 “No,” he finally said, turning back to her. “That would not do. Very well.” He lowered his gaze in maddening false modesty. “A man accepts. A man is honoured.”

 “I _don’t care_ that you’re being sarcastic,” she sneered.

 She only cared, she realised, about grasping this chance to take some control back. To wipe his constant stupid half-smile off his face without slitting his throat, and to see him dissolve beneath her.

 She didn’t know a tremendous amount about how men were, but she did know that they generally could not deny themselves as women could, and they could not easily mimic climax and dissolution. Arya Stark would leave with nothing but lies and memories of lies, perhaps. But she would remember having him, if nothing else, at her mercy—and this surely would assuage some of the loss she felt.

 ( _Your pretty sister…should have fucked her bloody._ _At least then I’d have one happy memory_ , she remembers the Hound saying, as he pleaded with him to kill her.)

 (The unwelcome thought of the hated Hound still hurt, somehow.)

 Jaqen gently cleared his throat, and Arya realised heatedly that she had been standing silent for some moments. He seemed incredibly amused. “Perhaps a girl can start by providing better instruction as to what—“

 “Shut up,” she said.“I was thinking. All right.” Arya took a breath. “Stand up. Put down your weapons. All of them.”

 Jaqen stood, and she stepped back reflexively. This was a silly command and they both knew it; had he wanted her to be dead, she would be dead. With a practiced efficiency he removed several knives from his robe, a few small vials. He also removed some various sharp and wicked objects from the bed. All these he put on the desk, and then stepped back from them. His eyes were hooded, sated-looking, a satisfied cat—albeit with an unwontedly avid gleam.

 She bared her teeth and gestured with her knife. “Take off your robe—take off all your clothes.”

 “If a lovely girl wanted only to see a naked man, she needn’t have risked her life. She need only have asked.”

 It would be a miracle, she thought, if she didn’t kill him.

 “ _Just so_ ,” she said to him, mockingly.

 But he smiled, and the warmth reached his eyes, before he removed the robe over his head.

 She watched him. Arya had never seen his body before, not even when they trained. He was lean and muscled, his warmly coloured skin scarred. His red hair fell to his shoulders, brushed his back.The candlelight pooled in the angles and pull of his muscle and bone, flickered shadows across him as he moved. His chest was lightly dusted with hair, that resolved to a line downward.

 As she looked at him Arya felt a drop in her stomach, and a strange low thrumming _pull_.

 He removed his smallclothes next, and Arya averted her eyes, feeling a sudden embarrassment at both her temerity and modesty.

 Without further instruction Jaqen leaned back on the bed, propping his back and head up against the stone wall. He tilted back his head, exposing his neck with the small line of bloody drying on his chest, and watched her, intrigued and…hungry, she realised, and only then did Arya began to feel she had taken a step too far. Something about his eyes, open wide now and waiting, and his long lean body—the anticipation and trust on his face and form—he makes her shiver. Makes her long to be close, to be held—to hold him to her and have him inside her. To have him.

 Her grip was bloodless; she had been holding on to her knife too hard.

 “Now, lovely girl,” he said, and extended his hand, his voice low and tender. “Come to me.”

 ( _If you would learn, you must come with me_ , he had said.)

 (These thoughts were unbidden. Arya Stark has left nothing and no one behind. She carries all her losses on her shoulders. She shelters all her harms with her rage. She will never have nothing, she told herself.)

 Arya tentatively took his hand, and he gently guided her up on the bed to straddle him. She was tense, and careful at first to keep her weight off him, but he chuckled and pulled her to rest on him. She kept her knife clenched in her little fist, resting on him, pointed at this throat.

 His skin was warm and golden underneath her pale hands and she is frustrated to see she is trembling. She can feel his heartbeat, and his hips hard between her legs.

 “The first lesson, for a man’s lovely girl—for you,” he said, gently caressing her, her thighs, her back, “is that, in all her dealings, this act is not only of the mind, but of the body.” His touch was familiar, but not demanding. He had strong blunted hands, a contrast with the vulpine grace of the rest of him.

 “All…all right,” she said. Anticipation and—and fear, perhaps—made it difficult to focus.

 “A girl must _relax_ ,” he clarified, “as if she is water,” and she breathed deeply, closed her eyes, melted into his touch.

 He rested his hands on her hips, caressing slow circles, and she felt heat pooling between her legs—and a dampness—and her thighs twitched.

 Arya resisted the urge to press against him. With someone else, she would not feel self-conscious of making some kind of mistake. But it was different, with him.

 This was like any other lesson, she reprimanded herself, although he was not clothed and although he was surely only feigning want.

 But it felt so different. Usually he was implacable and distant but now she felt something warm and real and sad and almost longing from him, from the way he touched her. The way his hands tensed, as though he was consciously keeping himself from digging his fingers into her. The way he seemed to be trying to keep from frightening her, when he never had before.

 (Like many times before, she wondered why this terrible man had always done all she had asked. Give me this pain, she had demanded, and by it, grant me this skill. And this one, and this one, and _this_ one. Get me out of here. Take me in. Watch over me. Guide me. Kill this man. And this one. And _this_ one. Kill them all. And he had, he had, he had done it all.)

 “Sometimes, a girl must pretend to be afraid,” he admitted, generously ascribing her nervousness to artifice. “Some men, some women, glory in this. But in most cases, a girl would want her partner to believe that she wants to touch them, to be close to them.”

 Arya took a breath. Very well, she would pretend she was not a little frightened of him. She would indulge the dark thoughts she sometimes had of him, which she usually kept far from her conscious mind.

 She leaned into him, she rubbed her hands over his firm chest, over his arms, back and over along the line down his stomach. She explored the feel of him; she closed her eyes and kissed him, to explore the taste of him. Jaqen let her take the lead, his arms around her waist, making a soft sound of appreciation as Arya suddenly became more demanding, biting his lips, pressing her tongue to his, scratching down his chest.

 And she gloried in it, devouring him, doing what she liked. She felt drunk. She felt him hard, now, under her. She pulled his arms tighter and ground into him, she kissed along his jaw.

 She wanted to _eat him up_ and her desire left her gasping.

 His breathing hitched as her hand crept lower to his hipbone. “A girl has promise,” he said, and he gripped her tighter. He was losing the ease and grace, the calculation and economy he had always had before in all his movements.

 “Just promise?” She nipped at his neck.

 He smiled and narrowed his eyes. “A girl has more than promise. A girl has many gifts.”

 She had either passed or failed some test again—now, Jaqen took charge. He pulled her up and close and ran his hand over her buttocks and up her blouse, his warm rough hands on her skin. When he reached her breasts, to cup them, to caress and to pinch, she felt his touch like fire rushing downwards, and she couldn’t help but moan, and grind into him instinctively.

 “This may help you later, too,” he said, as if continuing a conversation. “Men, they prefer to _see…”_

 “Mmm. See what they’re fucking.” She nodded, trying to look like she was unaffected and focused. “Right.”

 He sighed; he had always been so good at looking so extremely long-suffering—a talent indeed, when she could feel his hardness between her thighs, below her dampening cunt.“There is a better way to put it, perhaps—they prefer to see their lovely girls.”

 She suppressed an inappropriate hilarity, and arched her back, resting her weight on her hands on his thighs while he worked nimbly at the ties of her blouse. “Men, or _a man_?”

 Jaqen smirked. “Both.” His eyes flared as he spoke.

 He tossed her blouse to the side, along with the cloth she used to bind her breasts. The air was cool against her exposed skin. He caressed her bare breasts; she moaned again in spite of herself. His cock was very hard now, pressed against his stomach under her. When he started undoing her pants she fumbled to help him, eventually sliding off of him to kneel on the bed as he kneeled before her. He pulled her remaining clothes off of her carefully. As he did so he kissed her, kissed her healing wounds, her legs, her dark curls at the cleft of her.

 She was undone by his tenderness, and how her skin seemed to burn under his every touch. Still, no one had ever seen her naked like this before, and she shrunk to protect herself, blushing, hating herself for such stupid weakness.

  _It was just a body_ , she thought. _Ugly Arya Horseface_ , she also thought.

 Jaqen either felt differently or was good at pretending. The only other times she had seen him so serious was during her training, when she disobeyed or failed him. But she had never seen him like this, his face dark and avid now with lust and wonder.

 “Oh lovely girl,” he almost sang in a sigh, as he pulled her arms away from covering herself so he could look at her. “Beautiful, bewitching girl,” he said, and she choked in relief, in the want she finally gives into.

 She reached out for him; he pulled her back to straddle him again as he leaned against the wall. He was completely hard and she was slick, and she experimented with rubbing her slit up and down his shaft. When he hits her _there,_ the feeling shoots like warm spurts of blood down her buttocks and thighs, up to her stomach, and her lips part too— _oh_. Something is loosening; something is coiling at the same time, like the first flushes of wine—but so much more _urgent_.

 Jaqen groaned, and his face is clouded, and he was grasping her almost too hard, moving against her, taking his pleasure in her.

 And the fierce joy she felt at this released her, and for once she would be no one in the world other than who she was.

 She twisted to meet him, guided his hands up to her breasts, and moaned at his ministrations. Arya thinks, monstrously, that she wants to hear the same sounds from him. She wants to ruin him. She wants to keep him with her always.

 “What _else_ ,” she whispered. Her grip on the knife was loose.

 His hand moved up to tilt her face to his. “You must look a man in his eyes, lovely girl, as if you hunger for him and only him.”

 “ _Only_ him?”

 “Many men are _possessive_ ,” he said, in a hoarse voice, almost a growl, and he took and kissed her hand holding the knife.

 “Wouldn’t that be an easy lie to see through?” Arya gasped, pretending she still cared about her lesson.

 “If it is a lie, then it is the sweetest lie that could come from a woman’s lips. A man in love, a man in lust, he likes to think the woman is _his_ and _his alone_.” The need in his voice, the way the clip and lilt of his accent grew even more pronounced, made her blood run even faster.

 (A man in love. She thinks, out of nowhere, of Gendry. Of the Hound and her sister. She thinks what it would be like to actually believe she could have someone to herself. To have her Jaqen to herself.)

 (Give me this. Give me you. The desire to possess, to keep; she knows nothing more lonely.)

 She ran her hands through his long hair, and he leaned into her touch and moaned.

 “Have you ever loved, Jaqen?” Her voice sounded thin and high now in the closeness of the room, the dripping candle. “Have you wanted someone for your very own?— _ahh_ —”

 He pulled back from sucking on her left breast, replaced his mouth with his hand. “Yes,” he said.

 “Man or woman?”

 “Woman.”

 She felt a lurch she could not name. Was she from Braavos? Lorath? Westeros? “What was her name?”

 Instead of answering, he moved his thumb down to her cunt, began rubbing her clit after dipping into her own slickness.

  _“Ah_ ,” she breathed, and had to regain her balance on him. She rocked her hips to meet his touch, and he was drawing her out, he was winding and spooling a heat and tension within her. She felt she was dissolving into the flickering heat of the room, into the red and white and gold of him.

 “I trust you know about how _this_ works, then,” he smiled, again lapsing into more intimate language, and she hummed assent. “ _Good_ ,” he murmured.

 “No name, then?” she needled. She would not be distracted. “Was she no one?”

 “She chose not to be,” he said, and his eyes were drinking in her body.

 Arya stiffened.

 “What was her name, _Jaqen_?” She said his own name like a blow.

 He looked up at her now, and grinned almost ferally—she had never seen him smile like this, and it was as frightening as it was arousing. Bright and hungry, and all hers. She would tear into him with her teeth.

 “ _Arya Stark_ ,” he said--a far deeper cut than hers.

 “You _lie_.” Quick as he had taught her, she cut him with the knife she still held—a short slash on his left breast, above his heart.

 He grunted, grabbed her wrist that heldthe knife.“A man loves Arya Stark,” he said, like a threat, his mouth twisted. His eyes flared wide, and terrible, as they always did when he was deathly serious.

 “ _YOU LIE_ ,” she hissed, and cut him again but deeper. Longer.

 He drew in breath sharply through his nose. “ _Arya Stark_ ,” he said again, his low voice urgent, tender and maddening and intoxicating.

 “ _Stop it_ ,” she begged, holding up the knife as her own pointless threat. “Please, Jaqen, please.”

 Jaqen sat up fully; he looked down on her now as he cradled her close in an embrace. She felt like collapsing in on herself; all her strength seeped away by his gentleness.

 He murmured in her ear. “A man loves a woman. A man loves Arya Stark.”

 “Jaqen—“

 He kissed her. “Jaqen H’ghar loves his wild Arya Stark.”

 Arya tried to bury her face in his chest, but he took her chin in and made her look at him, his crooked nose, his blue eyes, his full lower lip. A face she had first seen in a cage. A face she had seen disappear, but that she had found again. A face she would never see again after tonight.

 “No,” she said; she could hardly see for tears, and she pressed the knife into his flesh again, a third gash on his breast. “No, Jaqen, don’t. Stop. I told you, I don’t want to play.” 

 “A man does not play, nor does he lie. A man _has said_. I love you,” He kissed her, softly, on her forehead. “I love you, Arya, and I cannot for it destroys the both of us.” And he kissed her again, on her lips.

 She pressed her hands on his chest, as if to push him away, to protect her own heart.

 He sighed, stroked her cheek. “I would see you let go the pains that strangle you,” he said. “If I could, I would have you become no one, and stay here with me.”

 She had never heard such pain in his voice, not once, not ever.

 “That is not your choice to make,” she whispered.

 “No,” he says. “It is not. This, I know. And this is the pain that pierces me. But since you would follow your own dark path, I would see you prepared for what lies down it, though I know you do not yet comprehend all you still have to lose, and will lose. A man loves a woman, and would see her get what she wants even if what she wants will eat her away from the inside.” ”

 Arya wrapped her arms around his neck. “How long?”

 “Like this?” he said, and kissed her. (It was amazing, she thought idly, how just a kiss could so sear down to her sex and leave her breathless.) “Since you were grown…but surely you knew a man cared for a lovely girl, even when she was a lovely boy. This…inconvenient affection, this possessiveness and protection I feel…it has been the source of much of your confusion over your training, I am afraid. I would have you for my own.”

 “Then _do_ it,” she said, and now her own voice sounded strange.

 “Do what?”

 “ _Have me_.”

 He bowed his head, ran his fingers over her healing wounds in her stomach as if to gauge their state. And then laid her back on his long narrow bed, and was over her and moving down, kissing from her face to her breast to her stomach to her cunt.

 He spread her legs and leaned between them, and for a moment her courage faltered. When he began to lick, the warmth and wet and heat and pressure and the feeling was so unexpected and intense (so different from her own hands) that she could not help but gasp, and cry out. At first his ministrations were slow, broad, opening her like a flower. It is only when she relaxed into him that he began to suck and bite at and flick his tongue on her clit, all the while holding her down, stroking up and down her thighs as if to draw down energy from them to where his merciless mouth worked. She gripped the side of the bed to hold on, to keep from bucking too hard, or kicking or clawing at him because her climax was building, building between her legs. When finally she was softly keening and whispering curses, he inserted a finger into her, moving back and forth, curling at the walls of her—and then two, gently stretching her, and with both his tongue and the fullness inside her, a massive dizzying swell of heat and energy and lust she is powerless to combat surges within her, and her only way is to ride it, ride it up—and up—

 She covered her mouth with her hands to staunch her cry, as she shivered and came, as she pulsed out her orgasm around his fingers.

 For a moment, her mind was blank—she floated in white light and black void.

 She was still twitching when she looked up at his darkly glittering face, as he took in the sight of her. She pulled him forward and above her, grabbed his cock (hot, velvet, absurdly hard, for what she was expecting) and pulled inexpertly at it.

 “Please,” she whimpered.

 “A…girl must be—“

 “ _Fuck it,_ Jaqen, _please_.”

 Jaqen kissed her hungrily, cutting her off, before pulling away to spread her legs wider, stroking the inside of her thighs, until she bucks and begs again. He took himself in hand and positioned himself at her opening. Arya forgot to brace herself as he pushed himself inside. He gasped softly as he slowly entered her, as if in pain,. It did not hurt over-much as she expected; mostly it felt strange. He began to move, cautiously at first, and Arya was soon lost lost in the sweet fulness inside her, and in the slow soft rhythm, and in the scent and the closeness of him.

 And she felt a part of him and he felt a part of her even as she shivered out aftershocks around him, and her strange Jaqen, her realkiller, cradled her gently and whispered to her in a voice hoarse with want and need and worship, and the feeling of him inside and over her is so delicious she wanted never to forget it.

 For this moment, she felt slaked. For now, she felt satisfied.

 She urged him on at first until he needed no urging, until he was holding and clasping at her so tight it is almost painful. And yet still she tried to claw him in deeper, closer, because even the pain was perfect as he slaked his love and his lust with her, inside her.

 Eventually, his breathing and pace grew more ragged, and her hands slid off his slick back as she clawed at him. With a groan, he began to pull away; she would not let him.

 “Inside,” she said, urgent, “inside me. Stay close. Don’t—don’t leave me,” she said, nonsensically.

 “A girl is… _ah…_ is _imprudent_.”

 “ _Please_ ,” she commanded, and sunk her teeth into his neck, and Jaqen obeyed. With a strangled gasp, he climaxed, pulsing into her.

 His muscles quivered as he held himself over her and caught his breath. She had never seen him so lost; she adored it. After a moment and a last tender kiss, he pulled out of her. While she lay and caught her own breath, he reached for a cloth under his bed and used it to gently and carefully clean her.

 Just earlier he had sent someone to kill her. Now, he was so gentle, so caring, so protective of her.

 And none of that mattered at all, as she is about to leave, forever.

 She covered her face and did not let him see her brief tears.

 After he was finished, Jaqen sat next to where she lay on the bed. The cuts on his chest were still listlessly oozing blood, and had smeared across his skin and hers.

 “Was the lesson what you had hoped, Arya Stark?”

 She took her hand away from her eyes and looked up at him, at his enigmatic face—she is shocked to find grief there.

 Arya frowned. “You seem strangely affected, Jaqen.”

 At that he laughed softly, and it is dark and sad. “You make a man regret many things.”

 “What,” she teased, “all the shit you put me through?”

 “No. I do not regret all you have learned.” He sighed. “Oh Arya. You will go through so very much pain, and dark, all still to come. Better easier darknesses, more manageable pain come from myself, to…to teach you. No, you make a man think how he might have taken a different path.”

 “Then come with me,” she said, allowing herself to hope. “follow _me_ this time. Far and away.”

 His eyes went dark and his mouth tense, exactly as it had when she refused to come with him herself.

 “If you loved me,” she said, bitter now, “you would come with me.”

 He was so mournful as he stroked her hair. “A girl is the one who lies,” he said, not unkindly. “A man has his instructions and his duties. And Arya Stark has her fate, she is rushing back to. Never doubt that I will miss you tremendously, my cold hateful wild girl, as you seek justice where there is only agony. Never doubt that I am very proud of you. But if I were to come with you—“ he sighed, and some strange emotion jerked at his face.

 He looked away and took a deep breath. For not the first time, she wondered what pains had driven him to the House of Black and White. When he looked back at her, his face was warm, calm, untroubled.

 “You are being pulled into the past’s abyss by your pain, by your ghosts you tend to so assiduously. I can prepare you for some of the darkness you will meet. I can prepare you to meet those you hold so close, out of hate, out of love.”

 He gave a soft smile with no happiness behind it. “But I cannot give you any kind of life, precious girl. Only death.”

 She sighed, and pulled him down to lay next to her. For a moment she just floated, nestled against him. “You said you loved me” she piped up. “To love is forbidden, for the Faceless Men, isn't it?”

 He chuckled. “Of course it is. This, I do not contest. What man would listen to a god over the voice and wishes of his beloved one? He is her slave. This is not a thing to be tolerated, even if…” he ran his hand down her body, looked at her fondly, “even if the woman he loves would be Death herself.”

 Arya bit her lip. “Loving is useless. Isn’t it.”

 “A man might wish a girl did not love,” he murmured. “If a girl did not love, and love profoundly, a girl would have no list. Nothing to pull her back to her homeland. A man might be selfish; a man might have her all to himself. To see the storms in her grey eyes as she beholds an injustice; the spark in them when she has mastered something new.”

 She had no immediate answer so she pressed herself closer. He was coloured so different from all the other men she knew, she thought distantly, as she looked at him. Unlike those in the north. He had warm skin, warm hair like fire and smoke—and the white streak she still considered an affectation, also endeared him to her. Only his eyes might be found in her home country, a dark and chilly blue, so sad now.

 Arya twisted to rest on his chest, resting her head on her folded arms. He accommodated her, gently stroking her back as she spoke. “Then I’ll hire you, Jaqen. I’ll give you one of my names. I’ll offer it up. I’ll even give you Cersei. What will that cost me?”

 Jaqen made to look confused, pursing his lips, knitting his brow. “But a girl has already given a man a name, and he has accepted the price.”

 “What?” She frowned, struggling to remember. “No I didn’t.”

 He raised his eyebrow. “No? Do you not call a man Jaqen H’ghar? Despite being told, and _frequently_ ,” and here he pinched her and she scoffed and laughed, “that there is no such man? Jaqen H’ghar. _That_ is a name, and one that for you, I will accept, with nothing owed.” And he bowed his head.

 Arya placed a soft kiss on his lips. She accepted his answer; if not his refusal to come with her. She thinks that maybe, for him, both these things are love.

 A thought occurred to her. She rose, looked down at her legs and the sheets.

 Jaqen cocked his head. “Have you lost something?”

 “My maiden’s blood?” She smoothed the sheets, finding nothing. “Jaqen, did I not bleed? Why didn’t I bleed?”

 He laughed, pushed himself up to sit and brushed his hair back. He so rarely laughs, it was almost not aggravating. “I hoped to spare you that; this is a thing that should not hurt, lovely girl…unless,” he shrugged at her dubiously raised eyebrow,“you want it to.” He paused. “Did you want to bleed?”

 Arya considered. “Yes, I think…” she admits. “I expected to.” Love had always hurt before; it was a new thing to realise that it didn’t have to.

 A shock of pain shot over her heart, and she cried out and placed her hand over her left breast where she felt the wet warm stick of blood.

 “There,” he says, mock-solemn. He had nicked her over the heart with her own knife, a mirror of what she did to him. “You have bled.”

 The cut was shallow. She took her knife back, glaring, then laughing.“Thank you, I suppose.”

 And then she sighed and leaned to pick up her blouse. “I guess I’ll leave for the docks soon.”

 “Not yet. Stay a while, while you can. Lovely girl. Lovely Arya.” He whispered, now. “My lovely Arya.”

 He pulled her back to his embrace.She lay on his chest, near the sticky dried blood of his new wounds, and she felt a pleasing ache between her legs, and a pleasant piercing throb over her heart. As he caressed her hair, they speak words that could only be spoken, if they were never to see one another again.

 They did not speak words of farewell.

 She will leave silently at first light in another stolen face, and will stand at the prow of the ship when it sails away in the soft grey light and morning cold, the wind and sea spray inviting her home.

  _Goodbye Jaqen_ , she will think, _goodbye goodbye goodbye_. _This taste of a man’s love you gave me, this lesson twisted, has only made me hungrier. And even if I do not drown in rage like you predict, even if I reach the shore, I will starve in grief for all I have lost._

 She will not forgive him for this. She will not forgive him either, for giving her up.

 The scratch on her breast she had found comforting hours ago; now it is only one more reminder of what she lost. Like Needle. The scent of lemon cakes. Bloody silver. Dancing lessons.

 One more thing those that left her gave her of them.

 She has only one untainted possession left to her, and she repeats is quietly, under the rush of the waves and the wind.

 Cersei. The Mountain. Walder Frey.

 This list would be her strength. These names would drive her on, would keep her afloat, would keep her warm and fed until there was no one left.

 And only then she would starve. Only then would she freeze. Only then would she accept death.

  _Cersei. The Mountain. Walder Frey._

  _Cersei. The Mountain. Walder Frey._

  _Cersei. The Mountain. Walder—_

 (Her mother. Her father. Robb. Gendry. The bloody Hound.)

 ( _Mother. Father. Robb. Gendry, Hound._ Her thoughts keened.)

 (Jaqen. _Jaqen. Jaqen._ )

 (Her Jaqen; only hers, and never again.)

 Before her was Westeros. Behind her, nothing and no one. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: A note on her ‘other list’. Arya knows that (especially her family) did not leave on purpose. But the strange thing of losing a loved one (especially a protector) as a child—and often as someone even older—is that a part of you can resent the person for not being omnipotent enough to stay alive, to stay with you. She knows this feeling is unworthy, but that doesn’t stop it at all.
> 
> Also—I am about 85% sure that this Arya I am writing about here is the same Arya as in my other story “Pretty Sisters Lovely Girls”, and so probably will be linking the two more explicitly as of the next chapter of both. You won’t have to read both of them to enjoy either, but you can if you’d like.


	3. a man wants nothing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A man wants.

 

 

Arya Stark left a man’s quarters as the dark sky faded to dawn.

He watched her small form silhouetted in the doorframe as she goes, against the blue dawn light merged with the flickering gold of the torches in the stone hall. A chill comes in with the air. When she silently closed the door, his bare room seemed colder, smaller. _Darker_ , even, in a way he had not experienced before, that had nothing to do with candle flames or rising suns.

As soon as he sensed she had slipped away, he took a deep shuddering breath. He had not been aware he was holding it—he who was able control his heartbeat, his stance, his hunger, his very thoughts.

Or, _used_ to be able to.

The man sat up on his narrow bed, ran his hands over his face. Over _Jaqen’s_ face, through his long hair.

He pinched the candle flame by his bed out; he needed to clear his head, to be no one at all, however futile an endeavour it was. Physical pain could help ground him. The ragged little cuts on his chest oozed half-heartedly with his movement.

Not merely foolish but stupid, irresponsible, of the one called Jaqen, to do this. For a man to not only reveal so much of his thoughts to a girl, but to act on them.

When Arya was with him, she seemed to outshine anything else—she drew him to follow her now, even as all those years ago, when he called himself Jaqen H’ghar. Jaqen: a construct a man and a girl built together. That a man now found himself bound by, even as Jaqen was bound by her.

Perhaps he should have made her understand how cruel she had been, in giving him his very own name. He is certain it would have brought her fierce little heart a fierce satisfaction, in the justice of it.

Jaqen sat still at his bed until he was certain the sun was up, and she had escaped. If she hadn’t—well. He would prefer as much time as he could get between confessing love to her and seeing her bloodied face in the Hall.

But either way, he would be wanted for explanation.

He washed and dressed in the darkness; he raised his hand to touch his forehead. Not always necessary to change his face, but he needed focus now. The man could not face his Faceless brother and sister with the face he wore now, with its vulpine features and variegated hair—the face of Jaqen, who loves Arya Stark. A man he did not wish to be any longer.

Nothing happened.

He tried again, this time closing his eyes like a beginner.

His features would not shift, no matter how he concentrated or meditated.

The lurch of his stomach dropping was a novel feeling at least; he had not felt that panic response in some years. He took a quick deep breath, to help quell the adrenaline.

The man had only heard of this happening--being trapped in a face--and only from unreliable sources. It had not seemed impossible. It was decidedly not, however, what a man might call an event to be celebrated. It showed a lack of control, of devotion to the many-faced god, that he kept such wants and pains for himself. Desire and loss were the same sharp hooks, and he was now anchored into this skin by both.

Jaqen reached out to the stone wall, running his palm down and appreciating the rough feel of the sandy unfinished rock.

Very well. He would be Jaqen H’ghar when he met the others. Perhaps they would see it as only effrontery, rather than tragedy.

Jaqen knows more or less where they will be, his nominal superiors in the order. Each morning they attend to duties together (all men must serve) and hold audiences if necessary for any priest in the order with something to report. That particular morning, they were preparing ingredients for poisons and other useful solutions. He found his brother reducing oils over a small flame; they gleamed a sickly and slippery gold in their vials. His sister was separating petals and leaves from roots and stalks. The red petals had stained her fingers. In the dim room, the marks appear as black bloodstains. The smell of the oils and flowers was cloying and spiced; the room pleasantly warm and dry.

They both were looking up as he entered, expecting him. His brother frowned. His sister tilted her head, and watched him.

His brother wore, as usual, his preferred face. Handsome, if otherwise unremarkable except for the long nose and acid-green eyes. It is his First Face—the face he came into the House with for the first time. There was an unspoken disagreement among the Faceless Men, on whether it was more arrogant to wear your first face, or to choose another, with no purpose assigned to it.

(Of course, there was also a third group that always wore the masks, which prolonged their life. Also plenty of feelings in the order about _that_.)

His sister looked different from the last time they met. Her skin is much darker, her eyes and mouth larger. The man could always tell her by the warmth in her eyes, and the precise movements of her hands, whatever face she wore.

“Brother,” the man at the table said said. “Please explain yourself.” He looked weary, annoyed.

“Of course.” Jaqen moved to the table, began gathering the petals his sister was parsing and placing them in a mortar. He knew the sleeping mixture she was making; he had aided her often when he was younger. “What can a man tell, that his siblings do not know?”

Not what he wanted to ask. _Where is she, is she safe, did you let her go,_ would be better questions—but these were not worthy questions for a man who already could not shift his face.

“Let’s say,” his sister said, “what happened after she re-entered the House.”

Jaqen began grinding the petals into a paste, thoughtful.  “She came back to confront me. I spoke to her. I fucked her. And I let her leave, as was the original agreement.”

“You were to take her face, if she came back.” His brother sneered into a vial as he carefully swirled it, examining the contents.

“Oh, her _face_? Not her maidenhead?” Jaqen said, pausing in his work. “Apologies. In a m—in my defence, it is an easy mistake to make.”

“Evidently it is,” his sister drawled, and Jaqen and she share an almost imperceptible smile. Jaqen had always liked her much better than his brother. But he was not so stupid yet that he thinks this bond will protect him.

His sister only sighed, and took the mortar from him. “You tied her to you further. You shielded her once again. This is to the detriment and destruction of you both. You did not heed our warnings.” Her voice is sharp in its disappointment.

Jaqen turned his attention to shredding stalks, instead of grinding flowers. “I let her risk death, same as all the others,” he said.

She placed a hand over his, to stop him working. “You protected her, again and again. She never had to face the more permanent consequences of other acolytes.”

A man’s sister spoke truth, however he might pretend otherwise, and it galled him. “She is nothing,” Jaqen said, his lip curling.

“She was supposed to be no one.”

“And the Stark girl is neither to you,” his brother added. “I see you’re wearing the face she favours. Is this by preference, or necessity?”

His brother was unpleasant and dull, but he was not unintelligent. “A Faceless Man has no preference.”

“But maybe a man does,” the woman said, and now there was a real edge to her voice.

Jaqen said nothing.

“It is a problem, the two of you. Not just your tie. Her tendencies to rage and cruelty. Yours to protect, to soften blows. You have exacerbated her pain and loss, and now she will never be no one. Not only that, she will take what is not hers—what belongs to the god. This cannot be allowed; not with our blessing, our training.”

“Worse—she has compromised you,” his brother said, looking back into his vial. Jaqen is surprised to hear anger there, some pain. He and his sister both look at the other man, but when his brother looks up at them and raises his eyebrows his face is all calmness and expectation.

Jaqen’s sister touched his shoulder. “Yet we would keep you with us, brother. And therefore, you know what you must do.”

The order often left it to the recruiter to discipline a runaway student, even (especially) if the need for discipline was the recruiter’s fault. Taught both recruiter and recruitee something about the danger of personal ties, in and outside the order. Of what following the wrong light brought you, like some dumb moth.

“Find Arya Stark,” Jaqen said, putting his hand briefly over his sister’s. “Bring her the gift. Return the masks she stole.”

Their eyes flared; Arya must have been clever about taking them, that they had not noticed.

His sister nodded. “Yes.” She pulled back. “And remember, my sweet brother—the slower blade, the hesitating blade, is not the kinder. It is the crueller.”

Jaqen nodded, gave a wry half-grin, as he rubbed a stray petal in between his forefinger and thumb. The pigment ran down red. “One of my first lessons,” he said.

In fact, it had been his very first. His sister had seen the weakness in him, even then.

“And after you take her face,” his brother added, having finally stopped pretending that he was immersed in his work, “you will finish your last Westerosi mission, that unfortunately had to be cut short the last time. We have received new information.”

Jaqen tensed, kept himself from scowling but still narrowed his eyes. “Oh?” And in that one word—why was I not told before this moment?

His brother looked back down to his vials. “Apologies for not informing you sooner. You were busy with your teaching duties; we did not want to burden you till it had been verified.”

His brother was trying to be kind. And his sister was right—that made it sting all the more.

“Of course,” Jaqen said, silkily. “My thanks.”

They spoke shortly about the particulars of the Westerosi mission, both Arya and the other matter, and what was known, and what still needed to be known. A Faceless Man with Jaqen’s experience did not need an extensive briefing.

There was a short silence when they finished; in these cases, it was even less certain than usual a Faceless Man would return from his mission.

It was his sister that finally dismissed him. “You—pardon,” she said, smiling, “ _a man_ has his orders.”

“A sister is so unkind to a poor unlucky Lorathi,” he said, putting his hand to his heart like it hurt. Beneath his hand, his robe, the barely closed cuts from a lovely girl.

“I would also have you take this,” his sister said, reaching under the table and handing him a small satchel. “For your journey.”

They did not use any kind of documentation for briefing; it was also anticipated that a priest could estimate his own money and weaponry needs.

He cocked his eyebrow. “A gift? Very thoughtful.”

“Yes,” his brother said. “Masks.”

Jaqen gave a smile, a lazy cutting thing. He bowed before turning to leave, which was not custom in the House, to mock them. Also, perhaps, so they did not imagine they saw any trace of pain in his face.

“Brother—“ his sister’s voice, almost hesitant.

Jaqen turned.

It was his brother who spoke. “If you find her, and do not wish to take her face, there is one other option that could benefit the House—although it will be far far more cruel to her, and you will not be glad for the doing of it.”

The man walked back into the room. He slung the masks over his shoulder. His sister looked sad.

“What is it?” he asked, his blue eyes fierce.

 

***

 

Back in his chambers, Jaqen lit the candle again, and spread the masks on the bed.

Just hours before, Arya had been right here, under him, held by him, _belonging_ to him—

He moved them to instead examine on the table, carefully pushing his chemistry paraphernalia out of the way.

They had given him five masks, like he was some green acolyte. Three male and two female, four Westerosi, one that could be from Qarth.

Changing one’s face without a mask, as the most advanced Faceless Men could was part mindset, part blood magic. The mindset—the ability to become no one—was by far the more difficult to master.

A shift in identity was a shift in the semiotic significance of all the world contained. What a person sought and what they fled, dictated their path through the world. You shift what shines to you like treasure and what repulses you, you change who you are and how you move through the world.

Wine and women shone the most for you, maybe, or men and ale. A special kind of silk. Safety. A father who beat you. Wealth. How ice shone on glass in the last long winter. A family who died, and the woman who killed them. A loathing of oysters.

A love of ginger and clove. Citrus and a summer fire’s smoke.

It took dying—in placing all that you sought and desired and feared, on the altar of the Many-Faced God. In becoming no one, one was then free to become anyone.

Changing the face was almost secondary after that. The blood spell was hard (and excruciating) to master for those without an affinity, but once learned worked itself into one’s very skin, one’s first face (if one ever wore that one again—considered dangerous, especially for new priests). The death masks remained a shorthand: fire made with a tinderbox, instead of two wet sticks.

Jaqen scowled; he leaned over the table, bracing his hands on its edge.

He could see already the constellations for these faces, and while they would not be impossible to use, it would be foolish to wear them when—well. The thought not just vanity, he was almost certain: that for Jaqen H’ghar, no one shone in the world more brightly than Arya Stark.

The thought that given his current quarry, he would remain Jaqen.

 

***

 

She was not hard to follow, Arya Stark. Not for Jaqen H’ghar of Lorath.

Jaqen would be very surprised if she were not immediately heading to the home of House Frey. The image charms him, his lovely girl descending like a black and bloody dream upon whom she deemed the wickedest of Westeros.

But thoughts and beliefs are malleable things, and intuition often masquerades as certainty. The man chides himself for his confidence in himself. He has worn Jaqen too long; he is finding it difficult to separate what is Jaqen’s and what is not—if there ever was a difference.

He stopped in a one of the larger squares after he leaves the House; he lets the people and sound and canal-stink flow around him, closes his eyes briefly and clears his head. The sharing of blood is a powerful thing to one who knows the magic of it and he felt a pull, a barbed hook in his beating heart, pulling him North.

This confirmation satisfied him.

He booked passage on a small passenger ship crossing the Shivering Sea. It was strange to be someone pretending to be someone else—that extra layer of meaning and disguised meaning. Jaqen was posing as a Lorathi merchant, carrying Ibbenese luxury goods to Westeros. Mostly jewellery, some other trinkets like knives and small good-luck figures. He has taken them from the stores at the House, as well as added some more contemporary pieces from a contact’s shop. They are carved from ivory and serpentine and strung together with whale-gut and tendon. They were elegant, ethereal little pieces, exotic to those in Westeros. Not uncommon in Lorath—if he remembers correctly, he once had an Ibbenese-made knife as a young man.

He has not decided what he will do with Arya Stark. He imagined the path would become clear, when he saw her again.

The sea passage was a common and cheap enough route that he garners little interest. Still, it is always best to not to act against what others perceive your nature to be. He talked with his fellow travellers, he flirted with the few that cast him sideways glances. He gave a trinket to a young and pretty prostitute, leaning in close to her conspiratorially to drape the necklace over her head of honey-coloured curls. She smelled of attar of rose and cinnamon and sweat.

“To help you on your journey,” he smiled, letting the fingers of his right hand linger too long on her collarbone. She was hoping to find more lordly and wealthy clients in Westeros. There are always a few such women on every journey he takes to Westeros; most don’t make it much further than the first city they land in. Or much longer than the first season.

She clasped the small pendant, and thanked him, kissing him on the cheek.

He kissed her hand in return, looking up at her with his sly light eyes. The girl giggled prettily, hiding her mouth behind her hands.

Jaqen remembered once on a skiff with Arya, just the two of them, when she had told him a joke. It was after an exercise in infiltration and they were both wearing the faces of young men. She had short red-brown hair and a mobile little face, a pointed nose. She had acquitted herself well, and was in a fine exuberant mood as Jaqen rowed, taking breaks to dip her hand in the black and glittering waters, leaving a sliced wake behind her.

"A girl is going to tell a man a joke,” she said softly, in her young man’s voice, looking into the long quayside where night revellers walked, in and out of canal-side taverns, waving her hand slowly back in forth. The wake behind her pale hand undulated.

She had a terrible habit of referring to she and him as they were when they met, a girl and a man named Jaqen, although she was now a woman, and a man was no one. He warned her if she did this around the others, she would be punished — and not necessarily by him. She, maddeningly, had never slipped up once.

“And where’s this girl?” he said, in Braavosi. “You holding out on me, are you?”

“No stop asking questions you’re not telling the joke.” She spoke louder this time, a whine to her voice, every inch the slightly drunk apprentice she was supposed to me.

“All right—let’s hear it.”

The “joke” was convoluted and dark and Arya concentrated too hard on remembering just right. It started with ‘is death a boat?’ and ended with ‘I’ve frequently not been on boats’ and then Arya not waiting for his unimpressed reaction but doubling over and laughing at her own wit, prodding him to laugh too, laughing harder when he gave her a _look_.

Arya’s laughter (usually at her own jokes; the House was not given over-much to humour except Jaqen’s hobby of whispering dark little asides to her to make her break face during lessons) was the only unstudied thing about her, lately—she’d close her eyes, show her teeth, give in to it. He could see her face in his mind’s eye, below the mask she wore now.

He ceded her a chuckle.

Jaqen thought it is the very last time they laughed together.

In the present, he smiled at the woman again and took his leave. They have almost arrived; he has calculated the speed of his flirtation to be cut short by landing.

It was not a long journey, after all. After his gift of ivory, he kept to himself.

 

***

 

She was not hard to find, Arya Stark. Not for Jaqen H’ghar.

He put on a face before he reaches the Twins—an ugly rough Westerosi face, with a colouring and an added demeanour that might pass as a lesser Frey. He put it on before he strictly has to—he finds his rising excitement and anger and despair and looming loss too great, as Jaqen. The thoughts the mask carries, they are of loss and cruelty. But they calm him, focus him.

It took three days to find her, but he knew her as soon as she saw her. Arya had taken the face of a servant girl, a pretty and lush little thing far too beautiful to be working in the lowest kitchens at the Crossing.

There is some level of reconnaissance necessary to any mission from the House. He took great pleasure in observing Arya here, in her skill at being a different girl entirely. This one is exuberant and flirtatious; she moves confidently, she smiles often. He also observed, with a stabbing fondness, all the things Arya could never be rid of entirely—how she narrowed her eyes, and laughed too loud, and her graceful step.

Jaqen thought, sometimes, traitorously, of sweeping her away and helping her be the bloody little Fury she wanted to be. He thinks of lying next to her every night she will have him. He thinks of serving her, not the God.

But that decision, he knew, was made long ago, on the night he gave up his first name, his first face. If after this, a man who is no one gives up the House, he is lost in turn.

(It had frightened him--it frightened him now--how much he loved her and how he would feel her loss.)

(But grief of course is its own form of selfishness.)

It was seven days till the Lannisters came. Arya had not miscalculated; she in her pretty face was chosen to serve the feast when the Lannisters come.

It was seven days and six hours until Jaqen saw her lure Black Walder and Lothar somewhere downstairs, to the cellars.

He heard her carving, saw her coming upstairs and baking, soon after that. He hid in the great hall when she brings the late Lord Frey his pie.

He watched how she took off her mask and told Walder Frey her name, and slit his throat, and smiled as if the blood gushing out of the decrepit old man’s wretched neck is washing away all her pain.

She smiled; she thinks she has won. She finds his pain and horror delicious things. She feels, for the moment, sated.

 _Oh Arya_ , Jaqen thought, _oh my lovely girl, what have I helped you become?_

This sadism, this cruelty, was not what she was taught.

The Faceless Men are taught what hurts. They are mostly not taught _to_ hurt, not unless a premium is met. It is considered arrogant, distasteful—blasphemous, even—to take such things as another’s pain for yourself.

And Arya had done this before. And she would only get worse. He had always known she had this sharpness, this coldness, nestled in all her exuberance and loyalty and love.

His siblings, they had seen more clearly than him what he had thought could be channeled. Arya, his feral cruel lovely woman, who would bring pain and revenge and not mercy, never mercy.

Jaqen had thought she might be taught otherwise. She was prone to cruelty, yes, but only to those who hurt those she loved. To those she couldn’t help—she was also prone to protection and loyalty. She had always valued bonds so highly. How she hid Needle. How she protested the expulsion of another student when she beat him too many times in a row. We can do it together, she had finally bargained, when the Waif wouldn’t take him. She had not learned, even after what happened then.

She would never learn, now.

_Oh Arya, you want to have everything and give up only that which is easy. And for all you take, you will never have back what it is you want._

The more _kind_ gift to her, then.

Her face would be his. Mercy would be hers.

Jaqen had refreshed the poisons on his blade only this morning. It would be fast, and she would not suffer.

His lovely girl—no. Not his.

Not his.

_Lovely cruel wild girl._

 

***

 

It had not been a man’s idea to recruit Arya Stark; it had not even been his original mission. After the Starks fell at King’s Landing, the sister who had been playing Arya’s dancing master had told him to recruit her, if he could. The lovely little girl had disappeared from King’s Landing and she could not sense her death. His sister’s mission was complete, and she must return quickly with her report.

And so a man became Jaqen H’ghar. Little wild girls could be drawn to attractive and mysterious men, especially if they were both dangerous and exotic. A strange and handsome configuration of features—he had not worn it in much time. It was too sly a face, too handsome, to not be considered distinctive and thus memorable. But perfectly serviceable in this circumstance.

Jaqen, if he remembered correctly, was kind, and vain, and liked to keep aloof—although always tipped his hand, tipped his interests, anyway.

Jaqen claimed to be Lorathi. The truth was that a man had been born a slave, and in Lorath he found the first freedom he remembered. A trace left even now. When left to his own devices, when it was prudent, he preferred to be Lorathi.

He found her on the way to the Wall. She was lovely, yes, and brave, and more. Bright and angry and clever and quick, with her pale eyes and dark hair, always shining. How hard she loved. How hard she fought. But full of such rage and pain. It shone, oh, it shone even to him then. He had no problem identifying her. The kindest thing, he thought at first, was to grant her mercy. But then she saved him—or thought she saved him, anyway, as it is no great thing to pick a bad lock.

And then the evil girl named him.

And then she followed him.

So that now, he followed her.

 

***

 

She did not stop to put on another face as she escaped. Brazen, maybe, but he knew she would not want to dilute her pleasure with the face and memories of another. She had splashes of blood on her pale hands ( _a crushed flower, across the sea; a warm room_ ) which she hurriedly and with a small sneer brushed off on her dark clothes.

Arya was heading South, to King’s Landing, no doubt. He followed her quickly, silently, out the tower, down the path. She moved quickly, but not enough to seem suspicious.

They made their way down the path, she unaware of him. It was cold; winter is coming and winter has come. The road was bad here, wet and frozen. Her steps made a slight sound—she was not trying to appear inconspicuous.

His steps make none. The sparse woods surrounding the path was cover enough, if you were careful and if your prey was consumed with other thoughts.

There came a minor uproar in the castle behind them but it soon grew faded along with the lights into the cold and the dark.

He watched her. It was the last time he will watch her, he knew. His stomach lurched; he imagines a world without her, more dark and cold than the night they swim through now. He imagines feeling the same pull, but ever-downwards, into the arms of not his lovely girl but the Stranger. Mercy for her, not him.

Not for Jaqen H’ghar, to whom he owes mercy as well.

(J _aqen H’ghar is dead._ )

( _Has been dead. Must die again._ )

These thoughts were unhelpful; the face he wore suddenly felt like the mask it was.

He pulled it off and stopped. He is no one no more; he is Jaqen. Oblique and sharp and still Lorathi, vain and venomous and skulking as ever.

He closed his eyes; he exhaled and centred himself, pressing an obliging thorn into his thumb. He miscalculates, and it snaps.

A mistake.

Arya stopped. She drew Needle and she smiles. A crooked white smile, on a slight, pale silhouette against the moon.

She waited.

Jaqen walked out, his face blank.

Arya still smiled as she recognised him; she was baring her small white teeth.

He enjoyed how she tensed at the sight of him; he wants to drink her in. She looks tired. She has been sated, but like any drink once the merriment wears off, it feels like the tide has gone all out. Revenge is a shorter-lived pleasure than most. Slippery and intangible and false, like smoke.

For a moment they did not speak.

“Why are you here?” she finally said, sounding bored. She does not break her stance. “You said they would give me time; they would let me be.”

“They did, lovely girl.” He speaks with the same arch confidence as when they first met. “But then they sent me, for you took what was not yours. I am here to—“

“Give me _mercy_?” she sneered, the word dripping like acid from her mouth.

“Take your face,” he smiled back. She didn’t like euphemism, which is all she thought _mercy_ was.

She raised Needle further. “I thought Faceless men weren’t supposed to take the faces of people they know. I remember you getting pretty prickly and upset about my _freelancing_.”

“Only in cases like this. You are my mistake to clean up.”

“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you run,” she said. "Not in that face."

She threw a dagger, and while he dodged it, she ran over the sodden frozen brush into the tall and pale trees. She became a shadow under the starlight, a ghost of a girl.

He followed.

He was faster than she, but she would not give up. She kept running. Finally, he threw a dagger into the tree some yards ahead of her.

She stopped; turned. She looked sad, almost lost. “You _want_ to kill me?”

“A man wants nothing.”

At that she was back to herself, and she sneered. She began unlacing the top of her dress, her blouse, baring her small full breasts to the cold night air, and Jaqen could not help the surge down he felt at the sight.

“Not what I remember,” she said, backing up slowly, facing him, fondling herself. She hit her back against a tree, almost stumbling, and widened her eyes in surprise—looking every inch a soft and vulnerable thing.

 _She has really gotten very good_ , he thought.

She murmured, now. “You wanted me too, else you wouldn’t have been wearing your favourite face.”

He wondered if she had yet to tell the difference between one’s original face, and the masks. (He thought he had his face now mostly right—he does enjoy being handsome, however, even if it is never put to purpose, so he cedes that there may have been a tweak of size or colour in the last decade or so.)

“Not a mask, lovely girl.”

“What, I fucked your face into place?” And the cruel girl laughed.

“Something like that.”

And at the look in his eyes and the sadness in his voice, she fell silent.

( _Grief is only selfishness. Love is only a binding_.)

He stopped a few feet before her. She reached out to him, stroking his face as if feeling it for the first time. “Is _this_ what you really look like?” Her voice is soft. “Is this your face?”

“Yes,” he said, because it was true enough, and because he knew the answer would please her. He closed his eyes under her caress. She is dangerous, he knows, and yet it would not grieve him if she granted him mercy herself.

She pulled back, scratching his cheek as if preparing it for a mask. “You said you loved me. _Knew_ it didn’t mean anything. Men say anything when they think it will help them fuck some cunt. Knew that on some level, I guess.”

“Arya. _No_.” He took her face in his hands—she flinched, and it stabbed at him. “I told you the truth. But I also failed you. I thought I could show you the path. I thought I could help you find peace. But a girl’s heart, it bleeds still.”

She jerked her face away, hissing. She was unimpressed. “So _I pay_ for _your_ mistake.”

He was silent.

“I am no one’s lovely girl,” she continued. “I am Arya Stark. And you, you never stop playing. You said I’d be safe if I left.”

“If you had only _left_ , we wouldn’t have followed. I wouldn’t have followed. But you took the masks. And you took more than that. I just watched you _feed a man’s sons to him and slit his throat_.”

Her eyes glittered. “I want them to know what they did. To feel how they made me feel.”

Jaqen shook his head. “They never will. They are not capable. They deserve only pity.”

“But _I will feel it_ , Jaqen. And I love it. I love seeing their fear,” she confessed, her face all alight. “I love hearing them choke and splutter, in their blood, on my blade. I love even more when they go silent.”

Jaqen had never treasured pain; he had known little else before he came to the House. “This is not what a girl was taught.”

She scoffed. “Oh is that not _elegant_ and _mysterious_ enough for you?”

Jaqen laughed, and for a moment she is thrown, and her own true face shone through.

She was not incorrect—although she had a predilection for the grotesque over the elegant, in her core Arya was a little pragmatist; she did not do things when she did not see the sense of them. She could forgive, to a point, injustice done to _her_. Especially if she could ken the reason, like if she was to learn a lesson. He knew how she hated injustice, especially when it came to others. How her heart ached for them. How little pity she had for those who enacted it. Not a protector, but an avenger. It would eat her up. She had a righteous loving heart.

Arya blushed and looked down, tears and messy black hair in her eyes, and she folded her arms over herself, covering her breasts and pushing them up—before she launches the knife. Jaqen dodged the moment he saw her muscles twitch and it disappears into the brush with a hush and crackle.

She hissed in disappointment.

He smiled.

_A righteous little loving heart, through which beat the iciest of blood._

“I had to try,” she shrugged. Then, looked up. “Perhaps you can still help me."

"Perhaps."

"There some things I don’t understand—why I still want to be near you, for one.”

She narrowed her eyes, stepped close to him.

He let her.

Arya spoke. “And what you saw me do, what I did for justice’s sake—I am offering them up to the god. You should be pleased.” She was murmuring now.  She runs her hands up and down him, and the gods be cursed, he loves it, he wants to hold her and bring her back and help her, save her, let her be no one. He lets his lips part, his eyes close.

And when she tried to stab him, he was ready. Jaqen caught the blade tipped in a grainy black poison and thew it aside. He returned her feral smile and slammed her against the tree; pinning her in such a way that if she tries to escape, her arms will break.  He presses himself against her, her hand pinned with his round her throat.

Arya had been taught enough combat and grappling that overcoming a man of Jaqen’s size and strength was simple enough. But Jaqen had years of experience and training on her, no matter how gifted she was.

One day, she almost certainly would have surpassed him.

“A girl is so _very clever_ , isn’t she?” he hissed, shoving her against the tree. “You observe, Arya Stark; you always observe. But you don’t _see_. You don’t listen,” and he twisted her arm slightly so she _would_ listen, and hears her grunt with pain.

Arya has never seen Jaqen angry. He was not angry; but he wants her to think that he is. He knew how she thought. Words spoken in anger can often be more true—words were like weapons. This fury she can parse and understand. Before, she was so focused on her training, so anxious to learn and believe, that she did not see the hidden meaning behind the words he spoke to her.

“Lovely girl,” he purred, low and lewd into her ear as he rummaged through her clothes, tossing any weapon he finds beside her, groping when she protested too much—her skin is smooth and warm and soft; her muscles straining against him. He allows himself to enjoy it; he knows it will be short-lived. “Listen to a man now. Listen to me.”

Arya knew how to function the clearest, the calmest, the most precisely, when she feels threatened. When she is furious. He counted on this now.

She kicked against the tree, kicking them both back, and he uses the opportunity to pull her close and hold the knife in her hand against her throat.

"All right,” she said, archly, catching her breath. “I’m listening.”

“Good,” he whispered, “very good. This I can help you with.”

And he told her, holding her close, the knife cutting into her skin as she struggled.

He told her what it was to die in the House. He told her what it was to be no one, and why what she desired could not be.

It works like this, he told her—you offer up all your anger, all your desire, all your pain and memory, all up to the Many Faced God. Only when you are free of all that binds you, your very identity, can you be free to be anyone. You could not be told to do this; you had to do it with no expectation of a reward but peace. That is what he had meant by saying you could offer them all up to the red god, one by one.

A man wants nothing. A girl must want nothing.It is giving up your very heart, to give up this pain. To give up your name, even if you hate it. Even if you love it. There is no crueller task. Only then, can you see clearly. Only then can you give mercy, and not take revenge, which ripples out and out indefinitely. Mercy and freedom, to not be chained by your body. Even greater still, to still use it to give the gift to others.

Revenge is no mercy. Death is mercy. The body, the heart, are desires. To give up the body is a mercy. The death of your grief, and who you were — mercy. To grieve no more.

“I wanted this for you,” he finished, his voice strangled, aware of how he contradicted himself.

As he spoke she had relaxed, and he let her free. She stood in front of him, trembling. and he wrapped his arms round her waist. “You could come back, you know,” he said, hoarse. “Become no one. I would help you. If I could not, my brothers and sisters could.”

“But I would know too much, to do this.” She spoke into his chest and her voice was small.

“If you could give it all up—give it away, freely, and to expect nothing back. These meaningless things, desires, they change from day today. Desires tie the world to us. They tie others to us, we who must slip in and out of lives and places like a stiletto blade, too quick and sharp for blood to mark. If you could put it all on the altar, and become no one—please, Arya. Beloved girl.”

At this she went still. She placed her hand over where she had cut him, on her left breast. Over her heart.

“I cannot.” She shuddered a breath. “Jaqen, I cannot. It’s all I have left of them. It’s all I could ever have of you.”

And all they could ever be to one another was a knife in slow. And they neither could follow where the other led.

There were tears in her eyes. He felt like he is choking; Jaqen found he was feeling a rush of fear and loss and hurt he thought he had given away long ago.

“So you, Arya Stark. You’re not willing to die. You’re not willing to give up your pain and your loss, and you take far more than is yours to have.”

“Not yet,” she said. “Not _yet_ , I’m not done.”

He started again towards her, again backing her against the tree.

“A man will lose his only friend,”  she said.

“A man has no friends.”

She hit the tree. She sneered, and stood straight. “Fine,” she said. “Promise to kill them. And I will not fight.”

He cocked his head. “A girl has already been given her names, and she has wasted them.”

At that, Arya's grey eyes flared. She smiled, utterly cold.

“No. I don’t think I have. You said revenge is no mercy. Death is mercy. And to give up your name, your place in this world, is death.”

“Yes. A girl understands.”

“Well, maybe, but I don’t agree. They died knowing my face. All of them. Knowing my _name_. I’ll die having given you yours. I think I will make you lose yourself too. I think I’ll give you my own gift—in fact, I think I already have. A name.”

“A man cannot—“

“Not a man,” she says, “ _Jaqen_. Jaqen H’ghar. Jaqen, Jaqen, Jaqen, fucking _Jaqen_ , is your stupid fucking name. If I die, Jaqen, I’ll die with your name on my lips, and you will never be free of it and I will never take it back.”

Jaqen stopped, exhaled in wonder.

Such a bright, cruel girl, he loved.

It was like he had walked into her blade himself, willingly as before, as ever. Give me a name, he had asked her all those years ago. A gift, this construction—but the opposite of mercy. A place to fill out, instead of to clear.

And she gave him one, blindly, not knowing what she did. And he let her.

 _Give me a name_ , he had asked, as he wanted to beg now. Give me this sweet golden prison. I will be whoever you want me to; just let me be near you.

This was not who he was. Couldn’t be who he was. He was no one, he had to be no one, he could not be a man mourning his lovely girl, until one of his brothers put him out of his own misery.

“Un-name me,” he said, “so I may meet the many-faced god as no one.”

“ _No_.”

“Un-name me,” he said, “and I will let you go.”

He could not do this thing. But he didn't want to hurt her, either, with the crueller path. Surely his siblings would prefer both of them back, than neither. And if they didn’t, they could end him themselves. He would not kill this girl, his precious clever girl.

“Un-name me,” he said. Pleaded. “Show mercy.”

Arya’s eyes shone. “No. I give no mercy.”

“Un-name me.”  He took her face once more in his hands, pressed his forehead to hers. “Please.”

Her eyes closed and she leaned into him. “I can’t, Jaqen,” she almost sobbed. “I don’t know how.”

Jaqen pulled her close to him once more. She only closed her eyes tight, expecting the death blow. But he drops his weapons. She is confused; from here she could reach any one of his vital organs, with a long enough stiletto. With her little curved blade, she could gut him.

And what did he want? To be free, or to be hers?

“If you cannot,” he says into her hair, “then I must grant it instead.”

A girl was cruel, but a man might be more so. And the blade more slow still kills.

Perhaps this would would be enough to free them both.

He pushed her back, his arms on her shoulders. “Listen to me,” he said, and hates himself.

 

***

 

A man chose the path more cruel.

A man sent a girl away from King’s Landing. A man sent a girl to Winterfell.

As his brother and sister had asked him to.

 

***

 

On the boat to his next destination, he paid for privacy.

He sat in his bunk, and thought of all his siblings in the house he had lost. It was in their strongest qualities, the ones they could never be rid of, that they met their ends.

Arya, with a grin on her face, as cruel and jagged and bloody a smile as the slit in the old man’s throat—her sadism and anger would be her end. The Waif, her jealousy. Jaqen, his love. These are all double-edged weapons, in the hand of a Faceless Man.

_We do not bring justice, but mercy._

His siblings were playing with Arya’s fate, by sending her to what was her home. They were playing with him too.

He remembered his sister’s words: _Each thing to its own end. We each walk our own path of pain and joy, black and white, and the path’s end is of our own making. For all the points of the compass there is only one end._

_We never stop playing._

The candle flickered at his bedside. He watched a moth flit around it, frantic and joyful in its flight. He watched the moth finally reach it; there was a hiss as it charred and fell.

And what does a moth want, as it flies into the candle flame? His own teacher, his dark-skinned sister, told him what Maesters say of moths. That they are seeking the moon and become confused, cannot tell the difference. That they are programmed to follow the moon and this false star is so much bigger and brighter than anything that hangs in the sky, to them. It confuses and consumes them.

And that it is dangerous to follow the wrong light.

“Mercy, mercy, little thing,” he murmured, hovering his own hand over the candle. “Feel this pain no more.”

Jaqen snuffed the flame it out with his fingers. The pain cleared his head. And his cruelty had freed him, for now. He changes his face, from Jaqen’s—from his first face, to another’s.

And he wiped away the small pale scars on his chest like he was smoothing linen.

Like her blade had never been there at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dashed off after extensive travels and before even more thesis garbage. I realised as I finished this that my view and concept of the Faceless Men is basically hugely informed by my background in cognition and linguistics and a bunch of random neuro-junk—which was funny to me, after trying to write a guy who is evidently able to break free of his past and his interests and desires in a very profound way. Anyway identity is semiotics assassins are semiotics everything is semiotics blah blah.
> 
> That said, it was so very fun to try to live in Jaqen’s head; a character (like Sandor) that is very much unlike me. An exercise in written old-school biosemiotics, esp the Uexküll concept of umwelt. :) I hope you enjoyed it! <3
> 
> (If you’re curious, here’s part of the summary of umwelt (basically, environment/surroundings) from good ole wikipedia: “As a term, umwelt also unites all the semiotic processes of an organism into a whole. Internally, an organism is the sum of its parts operating in functional circles and, to survive, all the parts must work together co-operatively. This is termed the "collective umwelt" which models the organism as a centralised system from the cellular level upward. This requires the semiosis of any one part to be continuously connected to any other semiosis operating within the same organism. If anything disrupts this process, the organism will not operate efficiently. But, when semiosis operates, the organism exhibits goal-oriented or intentional behaviour.”)

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to FayeKNaime; reading their lovely story made me want to try my hand at my own.
> 
> This story is (as of now tentatively) linked with my other one, "Pretty Sisters".


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